50 horizon, a container ship was steaming toward the Gate. Although Edwin, who is thirty-two, was born in Argen- tina, he learned to surf in San Fran- cisco. He later returned to Argentina. As we began paddling back in toward the takeoff area, gliding watchfully over the swells, I asked EdwIn about the surf in Argentina. He laughed. "After this place, I couldn't believe how easy it was to surf there," he said. "The water was so warm! The waves were so mellow! There were girls on the beach!" O N a very big day, the city itself looks different. The streets and buildings seem glazed and remote, the lineaments of an exhausted sphere: land. The primal action is at sea. One January morning in 1984, Ocean Beach was so big that as I drove the few blocks from my apartment to the coast San Francisco might have been a ghost town. It was a dark, ugly day, driz- zling and cold. The ocean was gray and brown and extremely ominous. There were no cars at Kelly's or VFW's. I headed south, driving slowly, so that I could watch the surf. It was impossible to say how big it was. Wave measurement is an inexact science at the best of times, and there was noth- ing-no one-out there to provide any scale. It was twenty feet, at least, probably bigger. Sloat looked totally out of control as I pulled into the parking lot. The waves breaking farthest out were barely visible from the shore. Paddling out was un- thinkable. Fred Van Dyke, an early San Francisco surfer who moved away to Hawaii, where he became a renowned big-wave rider, once wrote that surfing thirty-foot waves at Waimea Bay, on the North Shore-the North Shore of Oahu, in Hawaii, is the big- wave capital of the surfing world- was easier than surfing fifteen-foot Ocean Beach. Van Dyke mentioned only the paddle-out, but others who have ridden both Ocean Beach and the North Shore mention other factors. "The way the waves on a big day at the Beach can suddenly shift fifty or a hundred yards down the coast-that doesn't happen on the North Shore," Mike Rowbotham says. "On the North Shore, the spots are mapped out. There are established lineup markers. There , are reefs and boils, and plenty of people around who know the spots cold. You're not out there by yourself among these shifting mountains of water." There was no wind at Sloat, but the largest waves were feathering slightly anyway, from the sheer volume of water they threw forth as they broke. And the explosions of soup that fol- lowed were unnaturally white. They looked like small nuclear blasts; watch- ing them made my stomach churn. When Mark phoned me half an hour before, he had said simply, "Sloat. Be there or be square." But Sloat was out of the question. Mark pulled into the par king lot a few minutes after I did. He turned to me and opened his eyes wide-his way of saying that the waves were even bigger than he had thought- and cackled darkly. We agreed to look at the surf on the south side of a temporary construction pier that the city had built half a mile below Sloat. As we were leaving, Edwin Salem pulled into the lot. Mark had also rousted Edwin at dawn. The three of us drove into the dunes south of Sloat. The swell was coming from the northwest-it was being generated by a major storm in the Aleutians-so the pier, which was four or five hundred yards long, was significantly diluting the power of the surf to its immediate south. The waves there looked barely half the size of the gargantuan stuff on the north side, and almost manageable. There was still the question of getting out, however. People some- times paddled out underneath the pier-a regular rip cur- rent, carrying water that the surf had piled up near the beach back out to sea, had dug a deep trench under the pier, so that waves rarely broke there. But it was nasty under the pier. There were loose cables dangling, and huge iron sheets sticking up at odd angles under the water, not to mention the pilings themselves, which were closely spaced and did not budge when the surf slammed you into them. I had paddled out under the pier a few times, on days when getting out at Sloat had been beyond me, but I had sworn not to do it again. In any case, even paddling out under the pier looked impossible this morning. Broken waves were rumbling through the pilings like smal1 avalanches through an iron for- est. The only non-lethal way to get out AUGUST 24, 1992 today would be to sneak past the guard on the construction project, run out on the pier, and jump off the end, which was safely outside the surf. "Let's do it," Mark said. The three of us were now sitting in his van-a brawny, battered, trek-outfitted 1975 Dodge-parked on a dirt road just south of the pier. No one had said anything except "Oh, my God!" and "Look at that!" for ten minutes. I had absolutely no desire to go surfing. Fortunately, my board was inadequate for these conditions; even Edwin's eight- four "gun" didn't look big enough. Mark had two big-wave boards, both over nine feet, with him. He said that one of us could use one of them. "This is why I don't own a board over nine feet," Edwin said. He gave a nervous laugh. In fact, this was why most surfers didn't own a board over eight feet: it might raise the question some- day of actually going out in conditions that required that much surfboard. Once, in Wise's shop, I had heard a surfer mutter, as he and his friends studied a ten-foot gun on display, "This one comes with a free pine box." The market for boards that serious was minuscule. Mark jumped out of the van, went around to the side door, and began changing into his wetsuit. For the first time since I'd moved to San Francisco, I was ready to refuse to go out, and Mark seemed to realize it. "Come on, Edwin," he said. "We've surfed big- " ger waves. They probably had, too. Mark and Edwin had a pact, informal but fierce, having to do with surfing big waves. They had been surfing together since they met, in 1978, in Argentina. After Edwin moved to San Francisco to live with his mother, Mark and Edwin became friends. They surfed together often, and Mark started taking an interest in Edwin's welfare: counsel- ling him about how to get along in the United States, encouraging him to go to college. When Edwin passed his first semester of junior college, Mark took him out for lunch to celebrate. Edwin treasured Mark's foster-pater- nal guidance, which came to include a running pep talk on the subject of big-wave surfing. Over time, Mark persuaded Edwin that he was capable of surfing much larger waves than he thought he was. Edwin had the physi- cal equipment for big waves; he was powerfully built, a strong swimmer, a